Montreal Fights about Everything – except the Canadiens

It sometimes feels like the only thing English- and French-speaking Montrealers agree on is that we all love the Canadiens.

Of course, it’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not that far from the truth. Hugh MacLennan published his classic novel, Two Solitudes, in 1945, forever cementing the phrase in the lexicon in Quebec and in Canada, but things have changed big time in the decades since. English Montrealers speak a lot more French than they did in 1945, and the two communities are more closely knit than they were back then.

But—and it is a gigantic “but”—the solitudes are still a thing. From Quebec nationalism to city politics to culture, the two communities see things very differently. Even the Canadiens. The English and French can both agree that we live and die with le bleu-blanc-rouge, but in some ways, we don’t see the same thing when we go to the Bell Centre.

One guy who knows all about those differences is P. J. Stock. He grew up on the mostly English-speaking West Island, started his hockey career with the Victoriaville Tigres in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, and then ended up playing for a slew of National Hockey League teams, including the New York Rangers, Boston Bruins, Philadelphia Flyers, and, briefly, the Canadiens. At five feet ten and under 200 pounds, Stock was an unlikely enforcer, but fighting was what he was most known for in his NHL career.

He became more famous after he retired, hosting a show on Montreal radio station TSN 690 and then later becoming a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada. In recent years, he’s become a regular on L’Antichambre, the very popular post-game talk show on French-language sports network RDS. So he knows all about the contrasts between how the English and French see the Canadiens.

“The English fan is a fan and a very passionate fan, but I don’t think we have the same level of fanaticism in us that the French fans have,” said Stock. “To them, it’s more than just hockey, and I think to an English fan, it’s hockey. And that’s what makes it special for (French-speaking fans). I’m going to watch a hockey game; they’re going to watch their history skate by.”

Stock sees it in the way the French-language media covers the Habs. Language politics is often lurking in the shadows. “I work in French TV,” said Stock. “There could be an English guy in Laval having a good year, and there could be a French guy having not as good of a year but a good year. And the French want their player called up. Not because it’s good for the team necessarily, but it’s better for what their thought process of the team is. I’ve learned to really love it about the French community. I think they’re crazy, and I tell them that.”

Like many—most?—anglo Montreal fans, Stock doesn’t get why the coach has to be able to speak French. Virtually all French-language journalists and many franco fans would disagree with him on this.

“The fact that it’s more important to the organization to have a coach that can talk to the fans instead of being able to talk to the players, that is the crazy thing,” said Stock. “There are three French guys on the team, but the coach has to be able to speak French. And I’m like—‘What about the seventeen players on the team that speak English and have to win these games?’ I’d argue with the guys (in the franco media)—I’d say, ‘Don’t get the Frenchest guy, get the best guy!’ I’d say, ‘Would the fans rather win?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah of course, but if we’re going to lose, let’s lose with our guys.’”

Stock has come to realize that attitude is what makes this place so distinct, both politically and in its sports culture.

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Sergio Momesso knows all too well how unique it is to play in the pressure cooker that is the Montreal Canadiens. Momesso grew up in an immigrant Italian family in the west-end Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—or, as Scotty Bowman called it when we talked, No Damn Good! (It’s a local joke, popular with chaps like Bowman who grew up just south of NDG, in Verdun, and often battled NDG teams on the ice in local amateur hockey games.) NDG is varied demographically, but its history is as a place called home by Italian, Irish, and English working-class communities.

Momesso wasn’t a huge Habs fan as a kid. He just liked watching hockey. His father had immigrated from Italy, and his favourite player was Boston Bruins star Phil Esposito, because of the Italian connection. Father and son loved watching those classic Canadiens–Bruins playoff games. His dad and his dad’s brother had come over from Italy, and his dad’s brother would always cheer for whatever team his brother didn’t like. That meant his dad would cheer for Esposito and the Bruins, while Momesso’s uncle would support Lafleur and the Habs.

Momesso played double-letter hockey in NDG and was often pitted against their archrivals, the Ville Émard team just down the hill, which included a fellow named Mario Lemieux. (Yes, Momesso confirms, Lemieux was already a full-on superstar even back then.)

Momesso remembers skipping school in the ’70s and going downtown to watch the cup parades. So he was pretty happy when general manager Serge Savard and the Canadiens picked him twenty-seventh overall in the 1983 draft, just one selection after the Habs snared another Quebecer, 1986 playoff hero Claude Lemieux. Both were playing in the Quebec junior league. Lemieux played for the Trois-Rivières Draveurs and then the Verdun Junior Canadiens and Momesso for the Shawinigan Cataractes. The draft was at the Montreal Forum that year, and Momesso’s family was there.

He arrived on the team when it was in a bit of a mini rebuild, led by captain Bob Gainey. He made it into the lineup of the 1985/86 team that would go on to win the Stanley Cup. Unfortunately, he suffered a major knee injury in Boston in December and didn’t play again that season. His name was not engraved on the cup, but he did still get a cup ring.

“The parade was amazing,” said Momesso. “It was twenty-eight [to] thirty degrees, all along St. Catherine, there was probably like a million people. You’ll never forget that day. We used to skip school to go watch those parades, and then you were in it. Just to see how much the people here love the game of hockey. Everyone says—‘When you come to play in Montreal, it has a different feel.’”

Momesso said it is definitely different for French-speaking players who play in Montreal. “You can be a star here, but you can also get a lot of heat,” said Momesso. “Me, I was an Italian kid playing here, and the Italian community loved it. They were proud. There weren’t that many Italians playing in the league. But people want to see another Guy Lafleur or another Maurice Richard.”

Dave Jackson, a former NHL referee who is now an analyst for ESPN in the US, grew up in the West Island suburb of Pointe Claire in the 1970s, watching those great Canadiens teams who seemed to win a cup every year. “I adored the Montreal Canadiens,” said Jackson, who reffed 1,546 regular-season NHL games. “And I didn’t know anything about the language issues going on in the province. It was the Montreal Canadiens. My heroes on the Canadiens were Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Serge Savard, Larry Robinson, and Ken Dryden. See. Three out of five were French. It didn’t matter.”

One of the thrills of Jackson’s career was reffing his first ever NHL game, on September 22, 1990, at the Colisée in Quebec City, a match-up between the Nordiques and the New Jersey Devils, with his childhood idol Lafleur on the ice with the Nords.

For Jackson, the Canadiens fans in Montreal are like no other fan base. He says his all-time favourite rink to ref in was the Montreal Forum, and he’s grown to love working the Bell Centre too. “I love working Madison Square Garden, but nothing matches the Bell Centre in Montreal on a Saturday night,” said Jackson. “The enthusiasm, the noise, the passion.” And the whole city comes together at the Habs rink, no matter their linguistic or ethnic origins.

“Everybody is part of a community,” said Jackson. “It wasn’t French or English. It was a melting pot of French, English, Italian, Greek, you name it. They were all there for a common cause—the Montreal Canadiens.”

T erry Mosher, a.k.a. Aislin, the Montreal Gazette’s renowned editorial cartoonist, also believes the Canadiens is the one thing that unites all Montrealers, no matter what language they speak. Maybe his most famous Habs cartoon is the one that shows the cross on Mount Royal proudly wearing a Canadiens jersey.

“I drew that in 2008, because it occurred to me that, look, the new religion, the thing that brings all of us together—anglophone, francophone, newcomer, whoever—is hockey,” said Mosher, in an interview in the basement of his Lachine home on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, with cartoons and drawings plastered all over the walls. “It has become the new religion for Montreal, and it caught on and it started a discussion. It’s probably one of my most famous cartoons.”

Mosher has many great Canadiens cartoons, including one that riffs on the fact that so many anglo Montreal Habs fans now live in the Toronto area. “Bob Gainey has this cartoon hanging in his living room,” said Mosher. “It’s a guy, and let me paraphrase here, the woman is saying she wouldn’t mind him going down to Henri Richard’s tavern three or four times a month for a few quarts and a smoked meat if it weren’t for the fact they now live in Mississauga.”

Dick Irvin Jr., ninety-three at the time of writing (in the spring of 2025), has been associated with the Canadiens for almost all of his life. His father, Dick Irvin, coached the Canadiens from 1940 to 1955, winning three Stanley Cups along the way. His son started doing colour commentary of Habs games on radio and TV broadcasts, beginning in the mid-’60s, working alongside legendary play-by-play man Danny Gallivan. Irvin Jr. retired in 1999.

Irvin tells two great stories about two English Canadians who he said saved the Habs careers of two French Canadian icons. The first story involves his father and Maurice Richard.

Irvin Jr. came to Montreal when he was eight years old and his father was hired to coach the Canadiens in 1940. “In the 1939/40 season, the Canadiens won ten games,” said Irvin. “The owner was senator Donat Raymond, and toward the end of the season, he got in touch with all of the other owners. It was a seven-team league at the time. New York had two teams, the Rangers and the Americans. And he said—‘I’m folding the team at the end of the year. I’ll go through this year, but I can’t keep it up.’ Conn Smythe, who was running the Maple Leafs, he really reacted. He said—‘We cannot lose Montreal.’”

The team wasn’t selling tickets. Some nights, there were just 1,500 fans in the 9,000-capacity Montreal Forum. “The team was going out of business,” said Irvin. “Nobody was going to the games.”

Irvin Sr. was in his ninth year coaching the Leafs.

“So Smythe talked to my father, and he said—‘I want you to go to Montreal,’” said Irvin.

And he did. The team continued to struggle, but it picked up after a few years, and Irvin’s Canadiens won the cup in 1944—with the help of a chap named Maurice Richard. “That was the turning point, when the fans came back to the Canadiens,” said Irvin.

Early in Richard’s career, he was injury prone, and general manager Tommy Gorman told Irvin Sr. he almost had a deal in place to move Richard to the New York Rangers, “because he was too brittle; every year, he’d break something and wouldn’t play,” said Irvin Jr.

“But my dad really wanted him on the team, and so my dad talked Gorman out of it,” said Irvin.

The other anglo who saved another Québécois superstar, according to Irvin, was Scotty Bowman, who stopped the team from trading Lafleur. It was after Lafleur’s third season, and he’d disappointed up to that point. Yes, he’d scored twenty-nine, twenty-eight, and twenty-one goals respectively, but he hadn’t yet lived up to the massive hype. (This, of course, would be a great start to almost any other player’s career.)

Irvin said that general manager Sam Pollock called a meeting after that third year, and he told Bowman and Claude Ruel, who was director of player development, that he was going to try to trade Lafleur that summer. Bowman said it was a terrible idea, and after “a spirited conversation,” in Irvin’s words, Pollock backed off.

“And the next year, Lafleur got fifty-three goals,” added Irvin.

So two anglos saved arguably the Canadiens’ two greatest French Canadian icons from being traded away early in their careers.

In fact, Irvin says there are those who believe his father saved the Canadiens. When his father died, in 1957, he was buried in Mount Pleasant cemetery in Toronto, and Conn Smythe arranged for six players from his Stanley Cup–winning team in Toronto to carry the casket from the hearse to the graveside. Smythe called out to Irvin as he was walking away.

“When I was about to leave, I suddenly hear ‘Dick,’” said Irvin. “He had the kind of voice, if he called your name, you stopped. And so I walked back to talk to him, and he said—‘Your father saved hockey in Montreal, and don’t you forget it.’”

English and French Montrealers do love the Canadiens with a similar passion. The team brings together communities “that are in other regards in a state of tension with each other,” said Anouk Bélanger, a communications professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

“The spring of 2021 was one of those moments where only the Canadiens could give all of Montreal a strong sense of united community,” said Bélanger, referring to when the team made an unexpected run to the Stanley Cup final. Coming out of a pandemic year of restrictions and isolation, their playoff surge electrified the city and became a rallying point for Montrealers across backgrounds. “Those moments of happiness are very, very strong.”

Angus Duncan—Gus to his friends—is an old-school man-of-the-people anglo from NDG. He spent a couple of decades running a hockey store, Sport au Gus, that was famous amongst local beer-league players for what long-time customer Sam Roberts—yes, the Canadian rock star—calls the legendary “game-ready sharpen from Gus.”

One day a couple of winters ago, Duncan was standing beside the outdoor rink in NDG Park just across from his store—which he sold in 2023—talking about what the Habs meant to him.

“Even today, I put on my Canadiens shirt, skate around the rink, and think of playing for the Canadiens,” said Duncan. “As long as I can remember, watching the game of hockey, there’s no other team that I watch. So yes, I’m a die-hard Canadiens fan, from five years old to now, I’m sixty-four years old. Living here, growing up, being an athlete myself, it’s part of our culture. French, English, it doesn’t matter who you are, hockey in Montreal brings us all together. Nobody talks about language. We’re all there for one common goal—for our Canadiens team, les Habitants, the Habs, the famous Habs. We’re all together, we’re all one. And I still feel the same way today.”

This excerpt from Habs Nation: A People’s History of the Montreal Canadiens is reproduced with the permission of Baraka Books Inc.